Wednesday, 25 November 2015

Funmilola Iyanda has been awarded an Honorary Fellowship by the
University of Cumbria, due to her leadership in media, gender equality and
global citizenship, and her collaboration with the University’s Institute for
Leadership and Sustainability (www.iflas.info)

The following text is from her Investiture Address, Carlisle
Cathedral, UK, 25th November 2016.

“Vice-Chancellor, University Staff, Distinguished Guests,
Graduates, Ladies and Gentlemen, family and friends, thank you so much for those
kind words and indeed for this wonderful honour.

I’m very grateful, not just for this invitation to be an
Honorary Fellow, but to be invited to share it with so many gifted individuals
that it’s been my pleasure to meet today.

This fellowship is important to me because my father always
wanted me to be a medical doctor, since that wasn’t happening l thought l’d get
a doctorate to please him but l never got round to it so perhaps he’d posthumously
accept this in lieu. Also l have never worn a graduation gown, so it was on my
bucket list. This lovely university is close to my heart because it has
educated some of the people dearest to me, accepted my country men and women
with warmth and provided me great opportunities to share my rather skewed world
view. I am excited at the prospects of future opportunities for mis-education
that this fellowship will mean. Now let
me share a few stories with you because stories are nice.

Nothing ever went the way I planned, well almost nothing. I
had planned to torment my mother with teenager angst, but she died before I
turned ten, ruining that excellent plan. At the beginning of this year I
planned a major cinema project, a new TV show and a fashion school but then I
fell very sick, ruining that senseless plan.

Last week my over-thinking 14 year old daughter Morenike
asked if I thought there was an afterlife. I told her I doubted it but feel
that, in much the same way our current existence makes little rational sense
and we cope without prior prep, so will we cope in an afterlife without further
prep from here on were such an afterlife to exist.

It must be my week of pointless questions because my friend
John Maclean, the kindest misanthrope in the world, also asked how I have been
able to do so many outstanding things despite limitations and setbacks. Because
I like to confound him with Nigerian idioms, I told him the saying, “when in
soup, lick it,” because I knew the idea of licking soup off one’s body would
undo his tidy mind.

Growing up, I was an impoverished skinny girl with fat
dreams. Naturally there was a lot of frustration but there was also a lot of
going to markets because well my mother was dead and I was the oldest and only
female child so I did most of the cooking. I developed a love for markets and a
dislike for my aunt who always responded to all my frustrations with a
non-committal “ona kan o woja” (there is no one route into the market). I could
be discussing quantum physics with her and at my most perplexed point, she´d
say but “Aduke ona kan o woja.”

It took years for me to understand that she was trying to
teach me to repudiate ideology and dogma in favour of adaptability, functionality
and multiplicity.

In my culture, getting good education is non-negotiable so l
was determined to go to university. I
worked 3 jobs from age 15 to save up for university. When l walked into the
lush fields of the prestigious university of Ibadan in Nigeria, l kissed the
grass and shed tears. Four years later when l walked out, l didn’t even bother
to collect my certificate. In my second year of university l had also walked
out of the church of my youth. Granted l was tired of the virginity
requirement, being unaware that l could have lied about that like many wiser
than me had. I walked out really because l was no longer convinced about the
infallibility of the one way, the true way, the only way.

I had begun to discover that for many things there are many
ways, particularly for markets.

I like markets, it is a place of human interaction, of pride
in one’s product and hopefully fair exchange of products for needs.

Good markets have clear functional rules that allow fair and
equitable exchange. When kingdoms seek to overtake another, they break their
markets and militarily surround them. Breaking markets is symbolic of a
suspension of respect for negotiation, interaction and fairness. A conviction
that one’s way is best and others are best following that one way. You may
recognise that principle in modern foreign diplomacy as “our interests”.

I hated school but loved education, I wanted to know things
and discover things not be told things.

I wanted to be a writer but I didn’t see how writers got paid , since I hated asking
anyone for money, I decided I’d be a journalist but my father wanted me to be a
doctor because well, everybody’s father wanted them to be a doctor, also my
father wished he was a doctor.

He said doctors made money and were respected; journalists
just get blown up or become impoverished.

My father ate his words before he died five years ago, not
because I didn’t get blown up, but because he liked to eat and words are nice.

So as a journalist, I saw and reviewed the world. Recently a
friend asked me what I thought about modern civilisation and I answered that we
may have made magical technological leaps but I doubt that we have a
civilisation. More importantly I have begun to think that a lot of what we know
may not have been completely unknown to past generations; I am alarmingly
beginning to suspect they chose not to unleash some of that knowledge because
they recognised our interest must align with the earth’s interest.

I have always thought that the greatest tragedy of
civilisations lost around the world to slavery, colonization and oppression is
deprivation of our modern civilization of alternative political, cultural and
economic thought and systems, some of which were very sophisticated.

My mind boggles when l listen to my friend Dr Bibi
Bakare-Yusuf talk about the documented seven different pre-colonial forms of
marriages in Yoruba culture. A culture evolved enough to be gender neutral
without sloganizing.

So as I stand today in this gorgeous cathedral, suffused
with a sense of history, of wonder and respect for those who have gone before
us. Monuments like this emphasize how great our individual capacity is within
the limit of our role in a never ending continuum of human endeavour.

The challenge with a winner takes all, one way to the
market, best way to be approach is that it leaves too many behind and gives
those lucky enough to fall within a narrow accepted box an over inflated sense
of importance and a genuine lack of ability to solve unknown problems. Everyone
ends up playing a role rather than living a life whether it is in marriages,
parliament or academia. This does not make for responsive, adaptive and happy
living. We are best when we are intelligent forces at play. Responsive, adaptive, artistic, functional
and magical.

We are at a time of unknown problems with leaders schooled
to solve known problems without the education to be robust in world view and a
distracting pressure to perform to the lights rather than function in spaces of
wisdom and introspection.

This is however not as scary as it may sound because when
things no longer respond to plan, no matter how we posture or fight, it may be
that we are in a large vat of soup with nothing but ourselves. It may be time
to start licking that soup, not a very aesthetically pleasing solution,
certainly not meant for TV but l bet it’ll be great on you-tube after all there
is no one way to the market.

What is the point of education if smart people can’t find
those alternative routes to the market?

That is my challenge to a new generation of leaders,
thinkers and doers.”

Ms Iyanda spoke to a packed Cathedral of graduating students and their families. Many of the students graduated from degrees with IFLAS, some offered in partnership with the Robert Kennedy College. Ms Iyanda was hosted by senior members of the University, including Vice Chancellor Professor Peter Strike, and Funmi's fellow Young Global Leader (World Economic Forum), Professor Jem Bendell.

Wednesday, 18 November 2015

There are 82
children’s centres in Hertfordshire, organised into 29 groups, serving a total
under-fives population of 76,560, of whom, over 14% live in poverty compared to
20.7% of under-fives nationally. Children’s centres are complicated places
delivering a wide variety of services in partnership with other agencies for
families who often have complex needs. They are innately complex and systemic
sites of practice.

In 2014, Megan Wilcox, from Herts for Learning, who is responsible for
the professional development of children’s centre staff in Hertfordshire,
decided to fund support for these leaders. She commissioned me to design and deliver
a 9 day leadership development programme, ‘Future Leaders’, with 24 heads of
children’s centres from across Hertfordshire.

We planned the programme using system leadership and distributed
leadership as central concepts, bolstered with an associated wide set of tools
and skills. We collected data and wrote a case study because we were interested
in how effective the programme was, and because we wanted to raise the profile
of leadership in children’s centres.

Literature
on work in children’s services documented the difficulties of working in a
volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous context but did little to support
the practical daily actions of leaders working in this space. System and
distributed leadership were well documented conceptual forms of leadership, but
mostly written about from a school perspective. We wanted to see how well these
translated into children’s centres, and so a project was born. The
programme was a combination of theoretical inputs, discussion of practice,
analysis of practice in the light of theory and theory in the light of
practice, reflection and practical activities.

20 of the 24 leaders completed a pre and post needs analysis
against seven different aspects of leadership. Despite the leaders’ very high
initial scores of 71% - 76%, there were positive gains across all seven areas
of leadership for the group. The increases ranged between 8% and 12% with a
mean 10% increase. This is a striking increase in leadership skill in a
group already performing at a high level, demonstrating that the action
research approach and practical tools did support leadership development.

The leaders all thought that the outcomes had been met and
rated the course content highly for relevance, appropriateness, quality and
pace. It would seem that taking a needs led approach was a key factor in the
success of the programme.

The leaders commented they had learned from the combination
of theory and practice. For example when asked what helped them to learn
leaders said:

·Linking theory
to practice deepening my knowledge of system leadership.

To some extent the process of being away from work also
created learning for them, as did networking with other colleagues:

·Time to
come away from the centre and revisit or learn new ideas

·The input
and support from the group has been brilliant and enhanced my learning greatly.

The tools and models that we used were cited as particularly useful:

·I felt very positive about having new tools and models to refer to

·The
tools you are sharing with us and the opportunities you are providing for us
have given some of us our positivity back

Providing underpinning
skills was vitally important to the successful enactment of system and
distributed leadership. As indeed was good quality facilitation of learning and
development:

A further unexpected
outcome from the programme was the validation that the heads of centres
reported as a result of the programme:

·I
appreciate how hard you both worked to make it work for us all but mostly I
wanted to say thank you for validating us.

Finally, a cost benefit analysis showed that there was a 6.6:1
cost benefit ratio or £6.60 of cost benefit for every £1 invested.

We sincerely hope that:

·Leadership in children’s centres gains more
attention as a niche area of leadership nationally and internationally.

·Models used in other settings are transferred and
tested out in children’s centres in the UK and elsewhere.

·System and distributed leadership concepts are
underpinned with practical tools and techniques of leadership and management.

·High levels of facilitation and an action inquiry
approach are used to deliver programmes to staff working in complex contexts
such as children’s centres.

I was really struck by some key concepts at the wellbeing festival and
how they resonated with my experience of delivering this programme:

·Respect and value: respecting one another was a key
theme in many of the conference workshops, and was inherent in the festival
itself. This resonated with the needs of the leaders of children’s centres to
feel respect from the Local Authority, partners and other agencies in the
children’s workforce.

·Love: I was really struck by the common occurrence
of love as a theme in plenaries and workshops. This made me consider how the
leaders of children’s centres gave out love consistently to staff and families
and were in need of getting some back.

·Burn out: the festival sessions on managing the
wellbeing of people who support the wellbeing of others really resonated. Thee leaders
were working in complex situations needed their wellbeing supporting if they were
to survive their demanding lives.

·Connection: connection within and across
organisations, across agendas and nations was championed at the festival.
Connecting isolated heads of centres in a supportive learning process really
helped them to reconnect.

·Sustainability: one of the festival themes: man
cannot live on air alone, and children’s centre leadership cannot be sustained
without support. We are delighted to be able to now run a second cohort of the
Future Leaders programme for deputy heads of services.

You can find the link to this
and all submitted papers here
at the Leading Wellbeing website, or via the IFLAS Research page here

The views of guest
contributors to the IFLAS blog do not necessarily represent those of the
University or its staff.

Find out more about the
Spring School and other courses run by the Institute for leadership and
Sustainability here

‘….The more famous these global goals are, and the more
widely they are understood by everyone…..the more politicians will
take them seriously, finance them properly, refer to them frequently and make
them work…’ (Project Everyone,
2015)

So
how do you make them famous? How do you share the Global Goals with seven
billion people?

The
need to engage everyone was clearly the agenda of the UN. On 25 September 2015,
the Guardian headline read ‘Global
goals received with rapture in New York – now comes the hard part’ quoting UN
Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, “…we need action from everyone,
everywhere. Seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are our guide …they
are a to-do list for people and planet, and a blueprint for success…"

This message was endorsed
by Dhananjayan Sriskandarajah, Secretary General
of Civicus, the global civil society alliance ‘….most importantly, the SDGs are
intended to be owned by people…. the SDGs need to become the people’s agenda
and only then will they have a chance of changing the behaviours we need, from
individuals reducing their consumption to governments fearing the political
price for not meeting their commitments….’ (Guardian,
27 September 2015)

So
the message from both these Secretary Generals is loud and clear - if the
global goals are going to be successful they need to engage people and be owned
by them as a motivating force. This is the ultimate challenge but it is not a
new one. Simon Dresner in 2002 wrote in his book ‘The principles of
Sustainability’ whilst sadly acknowledging the unavoidable reflexivity of the
world he was very clear that ‘…sustainability is a global problem requiring
global coordination of action’. From its
conception in the early 1980s, the Green movement itself was based on the need
for ‘grassroots’ action with the principled omission of centralised
decision-making. Action that involves
everyone; cue Project Everyone.

It
was also clear form the UN messages that the Sustainable Development Goals had
to become the people’s agenda and although this could be viewed as a widespread
responsibility they are certainly not going to get onto anybody’s agenda if
there is limited awareness. Cue the mass promotion tools of advertising. According to Philip Kotler, one of the most eminent
theorists of marketing, to enable companies to inform consumers ‘…they must
skillfully use the mass-promotion tools of advertising, sales promotion and
public relations…’

Both Richard Curtis and Sir
John Hegarty are global leaders - they are eminently well placed to accept the
challenge. But to engage seven billion people in seven days surely requires a
lightning rod? Is the ‘…. short, dynamic and snappy explanation of the global
goals...’ they have created with the help of a Llama and posse of chattering
baboons the lightning rod that will start an ambitious mass communication that
will inform the world and create a ripple effect to drive sustainable
solutions? Does it have the significant powers of persuasion that will drive
the action needed? Is this the right scope of messaging at this stage in the
communication cycle to be successful? Can advertising play a role in
determining consumer behaviour in the context of sustainable development?

We
put this to the test by inviting two experts in mass communications to review
Richard Curtis ‘short, dynamic and snappy explanation of the goals’

Our
discussion quickly revealed that the purpose of mass awareness of the global
goals was clearly central to the communication that Richard Curtis had created
and the payoff ‘Tell Everyone’ built on the message. But equally quickly, our
discussion turned to ‘how do you put this into action and is awareness itself
sufficient as a goal.’ Tell everyone seemed empty without a more specific call
to action. Is the importance of ensuring that everyone is aware enough to put
pressure on government? The role of commercial communication in building
awareness is certainly an important step in helping people to make decisions
and become more receptive. But does awareness of the goals alone without
understanding have a role? Without pragmatism and direction, does awareness
alone have relevance? Without the application, is the communication too high
level?

One
of the experts also highlighted the concern ‘that if you make people feel like they’ve “done good” by retweeting
something or some other ‘nebulous action’, it may actually be worse than doing
nothing because of the opportunity cost of not doing something meaningful
instead’. He referred to a recent study that showed that people who brought
reusable shopping bags to the grocery store bought more organic food – but more
junk food as well. Reusable Bags Make People Buy Organic -
and Junk. The idea being
that “you do good and then you treat yourself to a cookie”

Richard
Curtis is certainly leading the way with his communication in the sense of
being the first piece of communication that builds awareness of the goals but
is it an example of leadership? Is leadership more than building awareness? The communication experts both agreed that to follow the leader they needed to know
where the leader was going. They felt that leadership was about motivating
people towards goals but is the global nature of the campaign potentially a
barrier? The communication was bringing the goals into focus but it did not
bring a local perspective that placed you at the centre of the advertising
concept. Would there be a better response with local relevance? Do calls to
action by their nature need to be locally applicable?

Sir
John Hegarty, the creator of the advertisement, explained in a recent interview
on that the key objective of the communication was to ‘….create positivity
around a plan…’ (BBC World News, July 2015). So maybe this was never intended
to be a lightning rod but the lighting of a fire to start a wild fire. Richard
Curtis, Cannes said recently at the Lions Festival of Creativity, July 2015
that if you ‘…aim for the stars…’ you may ‘…. just get over the trees…’.
Building awareness could get you over the trees but by creating deeper
understanding, and a plan that brings out the role that individuals can play, might we reach the stars?

--

This blog was contributed by a friend of the Institute for Leadership and Sustainability (IFLAS). You can see some of the IFLAS festival participants discuss leadership and the importance of story telling, including Indian Actor and Director Nandita Das, philosopher Charles Eisenstein, Futerra founder Ed Gillespie, and IFLAS Founder Jem Bendell. You can discuss it on our Sustainable Leaders group, or come join us in April 2016 at our Spring School, where we explore these issues in depth.

What forms of leadership are meeting the sustainable development challenges of the 21st Century? Hear insights from across Europe, Africa and Asia, with senior executive graduates of the MBA of the University of Cumbria and Robert Kennedy College.

This open panel discussion will be chaired by Professor Jem Bendell with reflections from Rob Johnston MBE, Cumbria Chamber of Commerce.

·Weixiang Xie. Project Director at Shukaku, Cambodia; a project to develop the former Boeung Kak Lake.

Invitation to participate on the panel does not represent endorsement by the University of Cumbria, but our interest in stimulating discussion. Audience interaction will be welcomed, including any critical views on the theme or the arguments made by panellists.

Attendees are welcome to arrive from 5pm for a networking tea with our international MBA students, who are all senior executives from around the world. Additionally, some students from our PGC in Sustainable Leadership will join these drinks.